John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American political philosopher, born in Baltimore and educated at Princeton, where his senior thesis (1942) concerned sin and faith. He served as an infantryman in the Pacific during the Second World War, then returned to Princeton for his doctorate. After posts at Cornell and MIT he taught at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement, later as James Bryant Conant University Professor. A Theory of Justice (1971) was followed by Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001); he received the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
A Theory of Justice is the major work of the American philosopher John Rawls, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1971 after nearly two decades of articles on the same themes. Rawls sets out to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, the view that the right policy is whatever produces the greatest total happiness, which he thought had dominated modern moral and political philosophy.
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